On a scale of 1 to 10, how persuasive and interesting do you think your cold emails are?

Your cold email is fighting to claim attention over team emails, hilarious newsletters and notes from friends and family. No matter how cool you or your business are, if your email scores less than an 8, you’re not going to be seeing many replies.

This week’s cold email critique is all about mastering persuasion and building rapport in 4 sentences or less. Pay attention to this advice if you want to learn to write persuasive emails that get forwarded and reopened dozens of times.

Why Personalizing Your Cold Email’s First Sentence Works So Well

“I came across you guys through your blog article on Twitter lead gen cards and it helped me a ton as I was building a campaign recently (love the zapier trick you guys use).”

Sending out impersonal mass emails to random contacts is a waste of time and money. You need to speak to your prospects in a way that conveys that you understand their business and pain points. Brownie points usually go to salespeople who seem like they’ve really done their homework.

We like this cold email’s first sentence because it adds specific information relevant to their prospect in a natural and conversational tone. It frames the sender’s reason for connecting nicely while also complimenting the reader in a way that establishes rapport. Anything that indicates to the reader that you’re a potential client, fan or business partner will help you win points.

Takeaways from the first sentence of this email:

Write a customized sentence or use phrase to make your reader feel that the email is a personal one-on-one interaction rather than one of your thousands of prospects.

Use a conversational tone with words like “I” and “you” instead of indirect language like “The SaaS industry is growing…” Also be sure to focus on them more than you.

Establish rapport with flattery and the potential to be helpful to the prospect’s business.

How to Stroke Your Prospect’s Ego Through Email

“I also noticed you guys are using Optimizely for a/b testing.This means your ahead of the curve as far as optimization goes. “

The second sentence does an okay job of admiring the prospect. I appreciate this approach, as it also shows they have done their homework and have a good understanding of their audience. However, I would condense both sentences to say something like this instead:

“I noticed you’re using Optimizely for A/B testing, which means you’re already ahead of the analytics curve for most SaaS companies.”

I didn’t change much, but tightening the language and strengthening the comparison between the prospect’s company and the industry makes it stronger and more persuasive.

Also, please do be careful of typos and grammar errors in your email copy. Here “your” is used when “you’re” should be used. Little mistakes don’t bother everyone, but sometimes they do burn your chances of getting a call by signaling incompetence or lack of intelligence. If you’re not a native-English speaker or not comfortable with your editing skills, get someone to look at your copy before you start your cold email campaigns.